How to Take Advantage of Staff Augmentation in Software Development

Staff augmentation is a general outsourcing approach used by companies to swiftly gauge their internal team to fulfill IT needs. By employing outside developers to work in-house, IT staff augmentation plays a key role in reducing the gap between recruiting full-time staff and working with a remote team.

Outsourcing and staff augmentation contribute monumentally to the global economy. In 2017, the outsourcing market totaled to $88.9 billion globally, not only because it’s thought to be less costly to outsource. According to reports, organizations often outsource to focus on their main business activities, solve capability issues and augment service quality. In the last decade, outsourcing software development has gained huge traction. According to the World Economic Forum, a large number of organizations in the next few years are likely to use outside contractors, impermanent staff, and freelancers to build their teams.

IT staff augmentation provides a number of benefits, including secured flexibility, less recruitment time, efficient staff management, lower expenses, and affordable access to expert developers. To fit time and financial limitations, an increasing number of companies turn to staff augmentation, which provides benefits no freelancers or in-house team can beat. Staff augmentation, in short, is they to key to organizations’ success in this day and age. Nevertheless, several organizations are not aware of how staff augmentation services can help them.

Here’s a quick look at how they can take advantage of staff augmentation more effectively.

1. Always Ensure Clear Communication

According to a study, 85% of workers and executives quote a lack of teamwork as responsible for workplace fiascos. Clear communication is vital to the success of every development project. Processes should be set up early in the development lifespan to enable open communication. Project management tools encourage the sharing of ideas and help enable teamwork. A dearth of communication in the outsourcing realm can also lead to misunderstandings that can have a damaging effect on the success of a project. It is, therefore, important to be communicative when doing staff augmentation.

2. Developers should realize the principles of project

That it’s important to define the roles of everyone involved in your project goes without saying. Internal as well as external developers should appreciate the fundamental principles of your project and how they fit into your vision. Project managers and team leaders should be allocated to ensure individual errands are completed on time and to the possible standard. Well-defined roles also provide developers with a point of contact to share ideas and provide response.

It’s important to enforce development workflows if staff augmentation is to have some impact. All employees should understand the individual steps involved in the project, including when meetings are scheduled, what tasks have been assigned and to whom.

3. Embrace Management Tools and Technology

According to reports, companies that use any type of project management method are better at meeting budget, being on schedule, meeting scope, complying with quality standards, and meeting anticipated benefits. To benefit from an enlarged team, businesses ought to hold project management tools and technologies. Tools such as Asana, Jira, and Basecamp help keep projects on the right track by screening their progress at every level of the development lifespan.

4. Ensure All Coding Has a Record

Code documentation is the lifeblood of every software application. Organizations should go the extra mile to ensure that bigger teams document their code at every stage of the project. Software requires continuous updating and upkeep and having several developers who can read the code makes it easier to highlight problems or possible risks. Organizations should decide on a collective method to code documentation that is suitable for everyone, including bigger staff. Tools such as Swagger help enforce clear practices for code documentation and other important methods such as pair programming.

5. Be Flexible

It’s easier to integrate expanded teams if organizations promote flexibility. Maintaining inflexible development procedures seldom result in the desired outcome. Development practices such as Agile help teams to be more flexible and attain positive results. When working with an expanded team, a certain level of concession is always required. Enlarged teams generally have sufficient experience in working along with internal developers and often have unique insights into workflow best practices. By remaining flexible and promoting feedback, enlarged teams can help recognize more effective ways of working.